Trump Officially Adopts the “Everybody Would Do That” Defense

As Donnygate has unfolded over the past week, President Donald Trump initially offered a handful of brief, vague defenses of Donald Trump Jr.’s controversial—not to mention legally questionable—meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer and the damning e-mail exchange that preceded it. While fear and recriminations gripped the West Wing after it was revealed that Donald Jr. had eagerly accepted the meeting, even after being informed of the Russian government’s efforts to help elect his father, the president publicly applauded his son’s “transparency” for publishing the e-mails and called him a “high-quality person.” Now, as the White House shifts onto a war footing in response to the fallout, Trump appears to be floating a new defense of his namesake: seeking campaign assistance from the Russians isn’t collusion. And even if it were, would that be such a big deal?

“I think many people would have held that meeting,” Trump told Reuters on Wednesday, referring to the June 9 meeting Trump Jr., his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort held with Natalia Veselnitskaya, whom they were informed was a lawyer for the Russian government. “It was a 20-minute meeting, I guess, from what I’m hearing,” he added. “Many people, and many political pros, said everybody would do that.”

Trump’s claim is, unsurprisingly, misguided. After The New York Timesreported that Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Veselnitskaya with the understanding that she would provide dirt on Clinton, a number of Republican campaign veterans quickly preempted the defense that such meetings are standard. “If you can find someone in other presidential campaigns who has received [opposition research] from foreign interests, please share,” Stuart Stevens, who served as Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign strategist said on Twitter. Richard Painter, who served as White House ethics chief under George W Bush,wrote that such behavior could amount to treason. “When a Russian agent calls to offer dirt on a political opponent, a loyal American will call the FBI.”

Video: The Trump Administration’s Ties to Russia

Whether Trump Jr.’s meeting broke the law remains a subject of debate. When Russian intermediary Rob Goldstone e-mailed Trump Jr. to say that his contact had “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” the latter responded with unfortunate vigor. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. wrote. That could be a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which bars U.S. candidates and campaigns from soliciting or accepting a campaign contribution from a foreign national or foreign government, and possibly, it could also constitute a conspiracy. “All you have to do is prove that people entered into a conspiracy for that purpose and then took certain overt acts in furtherance of it and if you can prove criminal intent, you can prove a crime,” one leading D.C. lawyer told me in a recent interview. Trump, meanwhile, seems to be taking a less legalistic approach to rebutting the “collusion” narrative, throwing out any defense to see what sticks—and burning whatever credibility the White House might have left in the process. During a separate interview on Wednesday with Christian Broadcasting Network’s Pat Robertson, the president argued that despite Vladimir Putin’s well-documented hatred for Clinton, the Russian president would have preferred her in the Oval Office. The conclusion that Putin sought to aid his campaign doesn’t make sense, he said, because he is a “big military person” who will create “tremendous energy.” Trump’s full defense is below:

It’s something that you don’t like talking about, but again we are the most powerful country in the world, and we are getting more and more powerful because I’m a big military person. As an example, if Hillary had won, our military would be decimated. Our energy would be much more expensive. That’s what Putin doesn’t like about me. And that’s why I say, Why would he want me? Because from day one I wanted a strong military; he doesn’t want to see that. And from day one I want fracking and everything else to get energy prices low and to create tremendous energy. We’re going to be self-supporting—we just about are now. We’re going to be exporting energy. He doesn’t want that. He would like Hillary where she wants to have windmills. He would much rather have that because energy prices would go up and Russia, as you know, relies very much on energy. So there are many things that I do that are the exact opposite of what he would want. So what I keep hearing about that he would have rather had Trump, I think probably not because when I want a strong military—you know she wouldn’t have spent the money on military, when I want a strong military, when I want tremendous energy, we’re opening up coal, we’re opening up natural gas, we’re opening up fracking—all the things that he would hate, but nobody ever mentions that.

The fact that the president supports exporting energy to Europe—which does indeed hurt Russia—seems like a weak point on which to hang his defense. However Trump chooses to spin Donnygate, the reality is that his son has served up the greatest public evidence to date that the Trump campaign was aware of the Kremlin’s efforts to see Trump elected, and that members of his campaign sought the Russian government’s help to make that happen. In his interview with Reuters, Trump insisted that he wasn’t aware of either fact, despite his son-in-law and campaign manager both attending the Veselnitskaya meeting and being c.c.’d on the e-mail exchange detailing Russia’s ambitions.

Whether the president’s defense is in any way believable is, to some extent, beside the point. In the end, the only thing that matters is what Robert Mueller, the special counsel leading the Justice Department investigation into Russian election meddling, concludes about Trump Jr.’s stunning disclosure and what else the former F.B.I. director discovers in his probe. Depending on what else he digs up, the fate of Trump’s presidency likely resides in Congress’s hands.